From the KU Library Digital Archives

I have been taken aback by a recent endeavor to read the work of Seneca the Younger. I find reading from antiquity to be a fascinating endeavor, particularly in the non-fiction personal essay genre. One of my co-workers identified that this reflects a current TikTok trend implying that men think about Ancient Rome with some frequency, though I’ll admit that this is about the first time I’ve thought about Rome and/or the Romans in any non-soccer context in a long while. Reading old letters like those of Seneca’s offers a chance to feel oneself reflected as a part of human history that I don’t get out of other genres of writing – Namely, I can see how my own specific neuroses and eccentricities have roots well before me and can sense that those neuroses and eccentricities will continue to exist among people far past me, which helps me to feel that putting so much of my writing out here may have some benefit to someone a little further down the line.

Phillip Lopate’s collection The History of the Personal Essay, contains a letter of Seneca’s entitled “On Scipio’s Villa,” in which Seneca more or less defends the honor of the unordained bathhouse of a man who existed centuries before him. Seneca complains of the unnecessary ornamentation of then-modern baths. He contrasts the pragmatic approach to bathing of his forefather – arms and legs daily and full body once weekly – to ostentatious daily baths taken by men who toiled far-less. Scipio, he decrees, bathed sparingly to wash off sweat, while Seneca’s contemporaries bathed far more often to wash off what but ointments. He bemoans the unnecessary ornamentation of modern baths: “We have become so luxurious that we will have nothing but precious stones to walk upon.” 

Seneca and I are far different people, two millennia and a hemisphere apart. I can only read him through translation, only with context given by the collection, and the cleanliness and ostentation of the only public shower in which I ever find myself (the one in the locker room at Planet Fitness) would probably leave him in indignant horror. However, I am in consort with him. I feel his exigence in my person as I write this post. I too have a dingy old place of my own that I see succumbing to ostentation and petty luxury and feel the need to defend its honor.

This is the final year of the Memorial Stadium of my youth. Uniquely, the Memorial Stadium of the current year, the Memorial Stadium of my youth, and the Memorial Stadium of my parents’ youth are all fairly similar. Outside of the size, the south end zone scoreboard, and the height of the press/luxury boxes, the Memorial Stadium experience has remained relatively static since even my grandparents’ college days. To many, Memorial Stadium is an old dump that ought to be completely refurbished if not torn down entirely. I, for a host of reasons, chief among them the fact that it’s about to be completely refurbished, find it charming and want to sing its praises while I still can. 

The gameday experience at Memorial Stadium is uncomfortable, to put it in one word. Your choice of seating is between metal bleacher and mesh chairback atop metal bleacher. The bleachers are sectioned into seats, but one finds on a sold-out gameday that those sections were made during an era of a different sort of American, one smaller in height and lower in overall BMI, one who was tasked with watching college football when television broadcasts and its cousin, the media timeout, were not a given or even a thought — When metal bleachers had to hold them for two to three hours at most rather than three to four. When the Hawks are good, as they are now for the first time in a frustratingly long while, to see a game there is to sit hip bone to hip bone, bare kneecap to bare kneecap, and to stand sometimes at an angle in order not to be completely draped upon a nearby stranger. Cement pillars surround you in the concourse, the bathrooms on the lower floor are insufficient and far between, the men’s rooms on the upper concourse of the West side still have urinal troughs, and if those don’t work for you, the university wheels in portable toilets to split the difference. Food options are limited to what was carved out of the stadium’s interior some time ago. You get neither cell phone nor Wi-Fi reception while inside. The bedrock of modern amenities offered elsewhere are simply not present in this version of Memorial Stadium: The 2023 gameday experience, for those of us not in the suites, is not that dissimilar to the gameday experience of ten, twenty, thirty-plus years ago. 

It started as two stands, disconnected, on the East and West sides of the field. These only rose up to the height at which the North bowl end currently rests. That bowl was first installed in 1927, the West and East stands expanded upwards to their current height in the mid-sixties, and a press box added sometime in the forties expanded to include luxury boxes during the 1990s. There was a section of bleachers in the South end, which were something of an on-and-off presence from what I understand, absent in my youth, but I see them in photos and have heard sordid stories of their time as the seating section for Lawrence High students in the 1970s and 80s. As the rest of the sports landscape in America altered itself to support all manner of luxuries, those unable to afford a box offered nicer choices, KU found itself behind and was forced to rig up nicer sections for the petit-bougeois on both ends: The Touchdown Club seats, which I always thought looked like a miserable time, was added in the late 2000s, and the Field Goal club deck was stapled onto the North bowl in 2017. Its core remains that which was built in the 1920s, and it is clearly anachronistic among its peers. It has remained the same not so much out of a love for its history but out of a neglect for its change. 

It is not the oldest stadium in the Big XII. Officially, up until this year, that was Oklahoma State’s Boone Pickens Stadium, which was practically rebuilt during the 2000s. In 2023, in sort of a funny paradox, the Big XII added a new oldest stadium in the conference in Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium. Ours is still very old, one of the few stadiums that’s been in use for over a century at this point. Every big outdoor stadium in driving distance is far newer than ours. Kauffman Stadium was almost completely redone in 2009, Arrowhead in 2010, Children’s Mercy Park was built in 2011, Snyder Family Stadium has been only added upon consistently since the program’s resurrection in the 1990s, and the new Current stadium going into the Kansas City Riverfront looks to be as much of a vanguard for small soccer stadia in the US as Children’s Mercy Park was in the early 2010s. We in Lawrence are the only ones still peeing into troughs.

Thankfully, to many – and to an extent to me – this will soon change. KU Athletics has announced a planned $250 million renovation. The plan boasts improvements and increases in leg-room and seat-size, more luxury and club seating, increased dining options, more bathroom space, and better Wi-Fi connectivity. The renderings look nice, I will say. I am sure that the Memorial Stadium of the future will provide a comfortable experience up to date with the needs and expectations of the modern American sports fan. However, I will miss this ugly, old, unordained cathedral to sport that we’ve called ours for so long. 

There are diminishingly few places remaining to experience an unluxurious, unvarnished, uncomfortable version of sporting event spectation like this one. I don’t need anything more than the sporting event and the bare essentials in order to bring me out to a sporting event, and Memorial Stadium is one of the few places that provides only that. I don’t care for nor about the ostentations: I don’t need the dog parks, the in-stadium bars and sportsbooks, the club-level food courts, and I choose not to partake in them when given the chance. I will admit that I played a couple of rounds in the Rocket League cage when they had that at Petco Park, and I’ll never speak ill of the joys of participating in the 3M Duct Tape Challenge at an Alexandria Beetles game in my youth, but I’ve developed a laser-focus and an appreciation for the simple pleasure of giving myself over to an athletic competition in recent years that scant few stadia reflect back to me. One of these was, and for the moment still is, Memorial Stadium, but I’m aware that we’re losing that soon.

I find some virtue in that light bit of suffering we undertake as a part of Memorial Stadium experience. One could say suffering like that is baked into the crust of the whole endeavor. From the start, one of the driving factors behind the sport’s popularity was the idea that upper-crust young men at elite universities developed traits that their forefathers had developed in war. Theodore Roosevelt helped to keep the sport afloat at the turn of the 20th century because he felt the sport’s roughness helped to ingrain the values of a ‘strenuous life’ into young men, values that that young men of that generation and financial background were fortunate enough not to have to learn from the brutality of war. Intentional suffering done out of a gesture towards a simpler, more difficult time is in the bones of American football – Why shouldn’t I have to participate in a little bit of that myself? Perhaps emptying myself into a trough as a spectator is different from being ground into the dust by the Flying Wedge formation, but the spirit is the same! 

I realize that this is an irrational thing, to find something out of discomfort, but from my perspective, sports are an irrational endeavor in their entirety. It’s the discipline that gave us the magic circle, the rolling of Toomer’s Corner, the Curse of Colonel Sanders (which is soon to be put to the test again), and the Baserunning Glove. I have been filled with so much emotion in those confines, so little of it rational – I was moved to joyous tears after a game that only got the team up to 2-10 for the season and I fell into total despondency after a game that kept the team from hitting 4-8 for the season. I’ve seen Heisman Winners come in and dominate, goalposts go down, and every possible dramatic finish on the spectrum of feasible dramatic finishes, and still probably the most impressive thing that I’ve seen there was either the instance in 2022 in which a TCU kicker had an extra point try land in a trash can under the Field Goal Club deck or the instance in which someone beaned me in the head from at least 20+ feet away with an orange after the 2004 K-State game. I lose myself in the irrationality of sports (this is part of the reason why betting on games brings no interest from me), so the fact that I go to this total anachronism of a stadium to engage with the team for whom I care the most aligns with what I want out of sports. I realize that this is atypical of the modern sports fan, particularly the moneyed sports fan (If Travis Goff is reading this, I would not bank on a luxury box deposit coming from the Lawrence Society for the Appreciation of the Anachronistic), which is why the stadium’s going to be so thoroughly overhauled.

We have only a few games left in the year; the sun of the trough-and-bleacher era of Memorial Stadium is setting. The plan is for the stadium to be midway through renovations next year, one in which we’ll likely be playing at a significantly reduced capacity. That’ll be novel, at the very least, sort of like those years that the Chicago Bears spent at the University of Illinois’ stadium in Champaign, or the season FC Dallas spent at a suburban high school football stadium, or the season that the Chicago Fire spent at a suburban high school football stadium, or the season that the New York Liberty spent at a concert hall. Once the renovations are completed, I’m sure that I’ll grow to enjoy the luxuries, such as sitting in a chair with a back and being able to text my mom during the game – But I want to appreciate the unique thing we have for the final moments in which we have it.